Sadiq Khan this week marks ten years as Mayor of London, the longest tenure since the office was created in 2000. The Labour mayor, re-elected for a third term in May 2024, has spent the anniversary week giving notably reflective interviews — and using them, in part, to push the embattled Keir Starmer government for what he calls a "change of direction of travel".
Khan's ten-year remit has spanned an unusually compressed political cycle: three prime ministers from his own party, four from the opposition, two London terrorist attacks, the post-Brexit settlement, the pandemic and a hostile, occasionally personal feud with Donald Trump. In an interview with the Big Issue published on Monday, he called the US president's decade-long focus on him "absurd" and said he had "lived rent-free in his head" for ten years.
The local-election picture in the capital was more nuanced than nationally. Labour lost two boroughs outright — Croydon and Bexley — to a combination of Reform, the Greens and independents, and was forced into formal cooperation arrangements with the Greens in Lambeth, Lewisham and Hackney. The party retained Tower Hamlets, where Aspire had been expected to gain ground.
Khan told the BBC London Politics show on Sunday that the message from the capital's voters was "a verdict on the government, not the mayor", but added that "we have to listen, and we have to change". He declined to back any prospective Labour leadership challenger but did not rule out doing so if a contest emerged.
On the policy side, the mayor's priorities for the final stretch of his term remain housing, rough sleeping and the over-budget Bakerloo line extension. Greater London Authority figures published last week showed rough sleeping in the capital had fallen by 14 per cent year-on-year, the first sustained decline since 2017; Khan called the figure "a foundation, not a finish line".
The mayoralty's 2026–27 budget remains under strain. Transport for London continues to face the structural revenue gap left by the 2020–22 ridership collapse, and Treasury settlement talks for the next spending period are now expected to slip past the autumn statement into the new year.